Tips On Helping Your Child Save For College

College is expensive, now is the time to start planning! With these helpful tips, parents can be more prepared to help their child save for college

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Tips On Helping Your Child Save For College

Sending your child to college can be expensive, to say the least. If you plan to help pay for your kids to go to college, now is the time to start planning! With these helpful tips, parents can be more prepared to help their child save for college…

Start as Soon as Possible

The best thing to do is start saving for your child’s college education from the day that they are born. What happens if they do not go college? Well, you will have a nice pot of money that you can give toyour child to help them start a business. Another option is you have a nice pot of money to do something fun with your spouse! Either way, the sooner you start saving, the better. By doing this, you only need to put a small amount away each month. Not only that, but you benefit from the power of compound interest on your investments. By doing this your money will have, hopefully, grown significantly by the time your child has turned 18.

Make Sure You Are Aware of All of Your Options

Nowadays, there are many financial options available for children going to university. This includes taking out a loan, being awarded a grant, as well as Commonbond student loan refinance and borrowing services. Do your research to discover everything you need to know about all of the options that are available to you.

Put Together a Plan

No matter what your saving goal is, you are always going to need a plan. This is especially the case when it comes to something as big as your child’s education. You should assess all of the money that you have coming in and out every month – make sure you include all expenses, no matter how big or small. Then deduct a realistic amount for your living expenses. From the figure you have remaining, you will be able to decide on what sum of money you can comfortably afford to put towards your child’s future first.

Make Sure You Have an Emergency Fund First

Last but not least, if you do not have anemergency fund for a rainy day, you need to save for this before you can save for your child’s future. After all, if something goes wrong, for example, you need to buy a new air conditioner; you will end up dipping into your child’s college funds if you have not saved an emergency fund for yourself, which could cause you to get hit pretty hard with taxes!

Hopefully, these tips gave you some ideas for helping your child save for their college tuition. There is no denying that college can be expensive, especially when you factor in all of the other expenses on top of the tuition fees. However, if you have a careful and considered plan, and you start early, you should find it a lot easier.

Michele is a Family Life Educator. She is a mom to 5 kids and loves helping others strengthen their families! When she is not blogging she is spending time with her family and running around drinking Diet Coke trying to get everything done!